Burns, Paul E., "An NEP Moscow Address: Abram Room's
Third
Meshchanskaia
(
Bed and Sofa
) in Historical Context," in
Film
and History
, December 1982.

Mayne, Judith, "
Bed and Sofa
and the Edge of Domesticity," in Mayne,
Kino and the Woman Question: Feminism and Soviet
Silent Film
, Columbus, Ohio, 1989.

Youngblood, Denise J., "The Fiction Film as a Source for Soviet
Social History: The
Third Meshchanskaia Street
Affair," in
Film
and History
, September 1989.

* * *

Tretia Meshchanskaia
, Abram Room's celebrated 1927 melodrama about a
menage a trois
, made its way West under a variety of titles, among them
Bed and Sofa
,
Three in a Cellar
,
Old Dovecots
, and
Cellars of Moscow.
The film enjoys the distinction of having been banned (as well as
praised) on two continents.
Bed and Sofa
, as the film is best known in the United States, was Room's fourth
film. Like many early Soviet directors, Room (1894–1976) had come
to the cinema along a circuitous path. A physician specializing in
psychiatry and neurology, he served as a medical officer with the Red Army
during the Russian civil war that followed the revolutions of 1917.
Originally from Lithuania, Room decided to stay in Moscow after
demobilization and began to work in the Theater of the Revolution.

None of Room's three previous pictures—two short comedies
from 1924 that are no longer extant and the action adventure
Death Bay
(
Bukhta smerti
, 1926)—prepared critics or audiences for
Bed and Sofa
, a brilliant psychological chamber drama that lay bare the dysfunctions
and contradiction of early Soviet society. From the opening shot, we know
that we are not going to see a schematic narrative about enthusiastic
revolutionaries.

Liuda, a bored housewife who could not be more unlike the prototypical
Bolshevik "New Woman," lives in a one-room basement
apartment on Third Meshchanskaia Street (the literal translation of the
film's original title), a petty-bourgeois neighborhood in Moscow.
She spends her days idly, mainly reading magazines, notably the popular
movie fan magazine
Soviet Screen
(
Sovetskii ekran
). Her husband, Kolia, is a charming and good-natured but dictatorial and
egocentric stonemason. The couple is soon joined by Kolia's old war
buddy, Volodia, a printer who cannot find an apartment in Moscow due to
the severe housing shortage that was still a major social problem ten
years after the revolution.

Liuda is quite understandably annoyed by the addition of yet another
person to their cramped apartment; of course she has not been consulted.
Yet Volodia, ingratiating and helpful, quickly wins her over by proving
the perfect lodger. The sexual tension between Liuda and Volodia is
palpable from the beginning, so when Kolia is called to a job out of town,
it is scarcely surprising that Volodia takes advantage of the opportunity
to woo Liuda openly. In the movie's most famous and exhilarating
scene, Volodia invites Liuda to take a plane ride with him as part of
Aviation Day celebrations. This is the first time she has been outside the
apartment since the movie began; what joy! (And what stunning aerial shots
of a Moscow that is no more.) When Kolia returns home, he finds himself
banished to the sofa.

But now that Volodia is the "husband," he quickly begins
acting like one. If anything, he is more boorish and tyrannical than Kolia
ever was. The two men resume their friendship, joking and playing checkers
while Liuda sulks. She attempts, fruitlessly, to regain control over her
life by sleeping with her husband again. When Kolia and Volodia learn she
is pregnant, they are outraged and demand that she have an abortion, since
paternity definitely cannot be established. Sad and nervous, Liuda is
packed off to a private clinic, where other clients are a prostitute and a
young girl. Standing at a window, awaiting her turn, she spies (whether in
reality or in her mind's eye) a baby in a carriage on the sidewalk
below. She has a feminist epiphany. For the first time, Liuda decides to
take control of her own life, to have the baby and leave the corruption of
the big city. In the movie's closing scene, we see a confident,
smiling Liuda leaning out the train window, cross cut with shots of her
two husbands' annoyance, and then relief, that she has gone. They
resume their immature, carefree, bachelor life in their dingy basement
room on Third Meshchanskaia Street.

Bed and Sofa
is beautifully shot, acted, and edited. It was quickly recognized as a
masterpiece of silent film art and remains fresh and appealing
three-quarters of a century after its release. The film's producer,
the state-run studio Sovkino, eagerly offered this well-made film for
international distribution, but it was banned in Western Europe and the
United States for its sexual content and ambiguous
moral message. Yet, though the film was not commercially exhibited in the
West, it was widely seen through the film society circuits, which could
avoid censorship since they were "private" clubs.

Bed and Sofa
's reception in the USSR was controversial for reasons that sound
the same as those in the West but were in fact quite different. Room had
intended not only to make a picture exploring the social problems of urban
life during the last years of the New Economic Policy (1921–28),
but specifically to support the state's campaign against the sexual
freedom of the revolutionary years and against abortion on demand. What
went wrong? The Association of Revolutionary Cinematography (ARK) quickly
and unequivocally praised the film in its journal
Cinema Front
(
Kino-front
) as "one of the most successful pictures of Soviet
production," which dealt with thorny problems in a "soft
[meaning non-didactic], artistic, and consistently Soviet way."

Yet despite ARK's strong support, the film was excoriated for the
six weeks
before
its release in a carefully orchestrated campaign carried out in the pages
of the trade newspaper
Cinema
(
Kino
), the fan magazine
Soviet Screen
(which apparently did not appreciate Liuda's patronage), and the
conservative
Soviet Cinema
(
Sovetskoe kino
, organ of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, which had oversight over the
film industry). Room's movie was variously labelled
"psychopathological," a "Western European adulterous
romance," and an "apology for adultery." Given the
large number of European and American entertainment films that dominated
Soviet screens in the late 1920s, along with the frankly Westernized
products of the semi-private Mezhrabpom studio, the level of vilification
Bed and Sofa
was subjected to was suspiciously excessive. Indeed, the film was
successfully released, although with a new title,
Menage a trois
(
Liubov v troem
), that would not connect it to the "
Third Meshchanskaia Street
scandal."

In 1927, although few Soviet citizens were aware of it, the stage was
being set for the Cultural Revolution of 1928–32. By the early
1930s, Soviet arts and entertainments would be stripped of any remaining
creative autonomy to serve the interests of the state. This period of
social and cultural upheaval was followed by the formal adoption of the
aesthetic credo of "Socialist Realism" at the Soviet
Writers' Congress of 1934. Abram Room and his film were unwittingly
swept up into the whirlwind of change, criticized for lack of foresight
more than anything else.

Although Socialist Realism would not be canonized for another seven years,
its attributes were central to the cultural debates of the late 1920s.
Bed and Sofa
fit many of Socialist Realism's main criteria: it was plotted,
contemporary, realistic, and tendentious. But it had three major
ideological failings—none of which were related to sex. The first
was the lack of the positive hero, and worse, the fact that the film is
dominated by three
negative
characters. While Liuda is indeed transformed from a passive and amoral
social "parasite" to, presumably, a mother and a
contributing member of society, this is only because of her desire to
actualize her "petty-bourgeois" individualism. Kolia may be
a worker, but he refuses to attend political meetings because they are
boring. As for Volodia—he even
looks
neurotic (actor Vladimir Fogel's struggle with mental illness was
well-known in film circles; he committed suicide in 1929). Second,
Socialist Realism is supposed to show life as it should be; the path to
the new world. Reform in
Bed and Sofa
is partial at best. Third, the film fails to include a true proletarian
as counterexample to Kolia the stonemason and Volodia the printer,
petty-bourgeois craftsmen. The cultural revolution about to be unleashed
would be in large part an attack to eradicate
meshchanstvo
(petty-bourgeois philistinism). This film embodies it, especially in its
original Russian title
Third Meshchanskaia Street
, which comes from the same root word. No wonder the studio decided to
release it as
Menage a trois.
As a work of art,
Bed and Sofa
remains a superb example of European silent film. Given its context and
subtext, it must also be considered one of the most important films in
early Soviet cinema history.

—Denise J. Youngblood

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